Steve Martin Let's Get Small and A Wild and Crazy Guy comedy vinyl LP album covers

Steve Martin, Eve Babitz, and the Art of Being a Wild and Crazy Guy: A Vinyl Vogue Deep Dive

March 10, 2026

The cup runneth over at the Vogue. Not of Narragansett, no it’s comedy albums. Lou recently suggested that the Vogue create a comedy LP section. The first two comedy LPs of Steve Martin, Let’s Get Small and A Wild and Crazy Guy, were available for $10 apiece. That’s no joke. Everybody knows how talented Steve Martin is. He has succeeded at every level of the entertainment industry, but Lou sleeps on just how popular he was in the late 1970s as a stand-up comic.

Let’s Get Small, Martin’s debut album, went platinum and reached number 10 on the Billboard Pop Album Chart. Top of the Pops, dude. The album won the 1978 Grammy for Best Comedy Album, and “Excuuuuuuse Me” became a meme before memes. Add this to standout appearances on Saturday Night Live and Martin was massive. He became even bigger with his follow-up A Wild and Crazy Guy, if that is even possible. It was. A Wild and Crazy Guy went double platinum and reached number two on the Billboard Pop Album Chart. In 1979, Martin once again won the Grammy for Best Comedy Album and in 2015, the Library of Congress preserved the album. The novelty single, “King Tut”, went platinum and reached number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, under the name Toot Uncommons, were Martin’s back-up band.

Maybe because Lou was too young to experience it, Lou never thought of Martin as a stand-up. An actor, an author, a playwright, a bluegrass musician, sure. But not a stand-up. By the time, Lou came of age, Martin had diminishing returns withthe albums, Comedy Is Not Pretty and The Steve Martin Brothers, and tremendous success with the hit movie The Jerk. Martin was on his way to being a serious artist.

Proof of Martin’s status as a serious artist is the fact that he collected serious artists. Like with everything Martin has tackled, Martin demonstrated a profound talent for art collecting. The first stage of being a serious art collector is having good taste and building something substantial. Martin began collecting art with the work of Ed Ruscha in 1968, and then over the years he added works by blue-chippers like Roy Lichtenstien, Pablo Picasso, David Hockney, and Edward Hopper. The next level is doing a little wheeling and dealing. In 2006, Martin sold Hopper’s Hotel Window for $26.5 million. After you establish that you have good taste in the market, you go on to work for the museums and institutions. In 2015, Martin helped organize an exhibition on painter Lawren Harris at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Earlier he was on the board of trustees for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The elite of art collecting must have a bit of spicy scandal and Martin was involved in the sale of a forged Heinrich Campendonk. The highest stage of art collecting, which Martin has also attained, is the Peggy Guggenheim level, when you collect the artists themselves. In 2009, Cindy Sherman collector, Steve Martin, briefly dated artist Cindy Sherman. This is Nic Cage level shit.

Dating Cindy Sherman is cool and Martin has been a dignified stick man for decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, Martin dated Bernadette Peters, Karen Carpenter, Mary Tyler Moore, and Anne Heche (Yikes!!). But most impressive to Lou is the fact that Martin dated Eve Babitz, one of Lou’s all-time favoritewriters. Babitz is the very definition of a cult writer and a Zelig figure in the worlds of art, literature, film, and music. For more details, read the work of biographer Lili Anolik, who has helpedrevitalize the reputation of Babitz and put her back in the spotlight where she deserves. (BTW Anolik’s podcast on Traci Lords is one of the best things ever done on the porn industry.) The New York Review of Books put Babitz’s output back in print. And readers discovered her anew. Babitz, like Bukowski and John Fante, is an L.A. original. She and Joan Didion saw each other as friends and rivals. The hip crowd prefers Babitz. And that is saying something as Didion is a hipster darling.

For years, Babitz’s love life, which she documented in her writing, overshadowed that writing. Babitz is often described as a groupie, but Lou prefers to see her as a true talent scout, like Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham. Babitz recognized the potential of Jim Morrison, Walter Hopps, Ed Ruscha, and Harrison Ford. He also saw something in a young Steve Martin. Babitz suggested Martin’s trademark white suit, but more importantly given her relationship with Ruscha and the L.A. art world, Lou would guess that Babitz encouraged Martin to start collecting art. Babitz is definitely a piece of work. Just look at the photographs of her playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963. Iconic stuff. She was a wild and crazy girl who helped shape the wild and crazy guy. Get a copy of Steve Martin’s first two stand-up albums for sure but do yourself a favor and track down Eve’s Hollywood or Slow Days, Fast Company. Sometimes the cult is more fun than the classic.